Is the content bandwagon terminally broken?

Is the content bandwagon terminally broken?

Jun 14, 2018 | Marketing, Strategy

Back in 2014 Mark Schaefer wrote a prescient post he called ‘Content Shock’, in which he put the position that content marketing as it was then being practised was not a sustainable strategy.

Nearly 5 years ago, this was akin to heresy.

However, just like many others who have questioned the accepted wisdom over the years, time has proven him absolutely right.

Buzzsumo director Steve Rayson has released the Buzzsumo 2018 Content trends report, which is a compellingly sensible document for marketers, and should be read alongside Mary Meekers recently released 2018 Internet Trends report. Buzzsumo is a tool that analyses content, what is being shared and linked across the web, millions of interactions a day, so they are in a prime position to see the trends.

So many climbed onto the content bandwagon that the wheels have fallen off!

The sheer volume of material being posted has outrun our ability to even see it let alone absorb it, and why should we bother, when there is so much repetition, unoriginal thinking, and ‘salesey’ rubbish being published.

Which brings me to a conclusion in several parts about what marketers need to do to gain and keep the attention of those who are bombarded with content every day:

  • Be original and of relevance to a market niche. Without both of these elements your content, irrespective of its form, will just add to the pile in the trash folder.
  • Focus, focus, focus. Never was the old cliché ‘you cannot be all things to all people‘ more relevant.  The tighter and more consistent the focus on your market niche, the better.
  • Own your own digital real estate. Relying on social platforms is a mugs game in the long run. It can get you short term ‘results’, but what really counts are the recommendations of satisfied customers, and referrals from those who have some authority. Public platforms are not there for you, they are there to sell access to you to advertisers wanting to reach you, and they make all the rules. Owning your own digital home is not much different to owning the one you live in vs renting, you make the rules; you decide who is welcome, who is not, and why.
  • It is no longer easy. 15 years ago when all this digital stuff was new, just being there gained attention, recognition, and influence. By 2014 when the Content Shock post was written, it had reached what appears to be a tipping point, and just being there was no longer enough. As noted, Mark Schaefer saw that point before anyone else, and hindsight has proven him right. Now, half way through 2018, he is more right than ever, as the pile of trash mounts exponentially every day. Being relevant, interesting, and able to engage a market niche is extraordinarily challenging, and cannot be done in your spare time, or by the summer intern.
  • Content can still be enormously powerful. When there is so much crap around, when you are good, it shows. It may take a while to gain momentum, critical mass, and ultimately impact, but it can be done. The best content appeals to the heart before the mind, it evokes an emotional response before the rational one, and this is best done one by one. Interestingly, in this age of digital everything, the old fashioned hand written letter is regaining its place as a powerful communication tool, because it is now unusual, but more importantly, requires real effort and commitment to be present. We all respond positively to effort and commitment when made personally to us.

When you would like some expert help thinking about all this, we should talk.

Photo credit: Wendy via Flikr

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mad Men have morphed into Math Men

Mad Men have morphed into Math Men

Jun 8, 2018 | Governance, Marketing

Don Draper would be really pissed, his world has changed. His brand of advertising is as dated as the Model T.

Instead of having hundreds of creatively driven ad agencies, all competing aggressively for your business, which involved selling you on a creative product then cashing in from media placement commissions, we have a few global corporate agencies driven by accountants, chucking money at Google and Facebook who between them   have the GDP of France.

So much for media diversity and creativity.

Marketers have since time began tried to moderate risk and increase the productivity of their investments, by better targeting their ideal customer.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon have an immense data bank to use to target customers. Every time someone likes a Facebook post, tags a photo, expresses an opinion, shares an Instagram photo, or sends a WhatsApp message, Facebook adds it to the dossier they have on you. Google does the same thing, and better yet, Amazon actually knows not just what you looked at, liked, and shared, but what you bought, when, for how much, and where it was delivered.

All this is data, mountains of it, ready to be mined for profit, and to hell with privacy.

We have given our privacy away to the global wholesalers of eyeballs. It makes such a farce of the current ‘debate’ about the privacy of health records happening in Australia. Who cares if your doctor can log into a (relatively) secure database to check if you have an allergy, herpes, or are pregnant, she/he can probably find out by checking in on Facebook!

When I was a kid, we used second hand, historical data to try and target demographic groups of potential customers. Now you can track who they are, where they live, what they browse and buy, what interests them, and what they ignore, and how they engage with others, by mining the data.

The change has happened at breakneck speed, and has a long way to go yet, but it is clear that the data scientists rule, and are consolidating their hold on power.

Question is, do we really want these data nerds, exemplified by the ‘Zuk’ to rule the world?

It certainly has taken some of the fun out of marketing.

 

 

 

 

 

Is the supermarket business model about to be retired?

Is the supermarket business model about to be retired?

May 30, 2018 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy

 

The face of the supermarket in the 2030’s is emerging, and I suspect it is not a face most of us will warm to immediately. The combination of artificial intelligence and the capacity to automate just about everything will render much of the current supermarket  business model  obsolete.

The model of Amazon Go and Chinese Hema supermarkets will apply particularly to convenience stores, in high traffic high rent areas, like the inner city and business centres. Our grocery shopping will be done on line by voice, and delivered by some amalgam of autonomous vehicle,  Amazon, Ocado, or delivery services like FedEx, Uber and others that will spring up, which will hook up with the owners of the automated Pick ‘n Pack warehouses.

Amazon Alexa and other technology deploying voice ordering ensures a limitation of options, to those that favour the seller. With voice, we get the convenience of ordering from the couch, but in exchange we give up the visual cues of a store where we usually have several options, with differing characteristics and price points, and the resulting capacity of marketers to hang their hats on a point of differentiation to a group of consumers, a niche in the market. Voice removes all that, and will offer you only the one or two that the seller recommends, but their recommendations will be based on their commercial objectives, revenue, margin, and stock rotation, not yours, which are likely to be entirely different.

The recently announced deal between Ocado and Kroger adds a whole new dimension. Ocado is the first entirely e-commerce grocery business that I am aware of, to have leveraged themselves into a controlling position, and it took a while. Like all on line supermarkets, it struggled with fresh produce, and the higher customer acquisition costs that  are the result of having no physical shops. Ocado launched in 2000, went public in 2010, but did not turn a profit until  2014, a modest 7 million quid on a turnover of a billion. The logic appears to be developing and licencing their technology, but little happened  beyond the deal with the John Lewis owned Waitrose until Amazon bought Whole Foods in August 2017, which jump-started a rush into the technology to automate order receipt, pick, pack, and delivery.  Suddenly everyone was chasing them, and in November 2017 a deal was struck with Casino in France, and talks with others advanced quickly, culminating with the Kroger deal.

Kroger is deeply threatened by the Whole foods purchase by Amazon, and while Wal-Mart dominates US grocery, Kroger is a strong second, but has not had a viable on line offering. The potential for Amazon to convert some or all of Whole Foods sites into local delivery warehouses seems pretty real to me, which would give the relatively low on line grocery share in the US (estimated at 1.5% Vs 7.5% in the UK) a real kick along, and potentially add Kroger to the conga line of US retailers heading for the liquidator.  From Ocado’s perspective, the deal offers access to the biggest grocery market in the world for their technology, and led to a share price jump that will be making patient investors reach for the bubbly.

If we think that here in Australia we are insulated from all this, we are in la la land. While the distances here add to the complication, it is a predictable number, and therefore manageable by algorithm. I predict that one or both of the gorillas will be on a plane to talk to Ocado very quickly, if they have not already, although Coles might be pre-occupied with moving out of home, and resetting up in their own digs. Wesfarmers have been badly burnt by the Bunnings foray into the UK, brought to an embarrassing end last week by the sale of the former Homebase business for 1 pound, and would I suspect be wary of supporting an investment of this type for a departing problem child. It might just be an ideal time for Woolies to get a jump on them?

How much do I need to spend on marketing my new business?

How much do I need to spend on marketing my new business?

May 22, 2018 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

This ‘How much’ question was posed to me recently in a networking group by a young professional who had just left the comfort of a large corporate firm to strike out on her own with a business partner. My answer: ‘Depends’. There is never a right answer to  this question, every situation is different, but there are a few foundation things that should be considered, and they all involve some sort of trade-off.

Time.

Time is our only truly non-renewable resource, so it makes sense to use it as productively as possible, depending on your definition of productive. For this new firm, while they have clients, they also have more time than they had working as corporate ‘slaves’ in a bigger firm, so they can choose to use it for marketing, developing their professional competence, which is after all an investment in their future, or they may even go to the pub. Early on it makes sense to invest some of the excess time in building their marketing and sales processes so that they can ‘feed’  the pipeline of potential clients.

Money.

Nobody, no matter how big, has sufficient money in the marketing budget to do all they would like. Therefore it is a matter of priorities and choices. Never easy. It is also true that the way you see marketing makes a potentially huge difference. Seen as nothing more than a necessary expense, it is just a chunk of money going out the door. Seen as an investment, marketing becomes something different, by definition. While it costs money now, it is an investment in future prosperity. By gaining clients that will continue to deliver revenue over a longer period, without having to spend on getting them through the door again in the first place, the initial investment will deliver great returns. My answer is also always tied up  in the need to use available money as productively as possible, which means that before you spend a zac on the communication end of the marketing spectrum, make sure you have the definition of  the ideal customer and your value proposition in place, so you can accurately target both the potential clients and your messages.

Expertise.

Expertise you can buy in, but it is dangerous to buy in expertise in a situation where you do  not know enough to adequately make the choice between alternatives.  This applies  perhaps more than anything else the strategic/marketing end of  the service continuum, simply because there is rarely one right answer, and  there are no external professional standards to be met. This means that a  marketing professional may just be highly professional about marketing their  business, but hopeless at marketing yours. If you buy in expertise before you know what expertise you really need, you risk getting a plumber when you need a carpenter. Alternatively, you can buy in the expertise to assist define just what it is you do need before you make the investment in marketing activity. The instinct these days is to talk to a so called ‘digital marketer’ whose business it is to sell you digital marketing services, whether or not that is the best use for your money. It pays to be sure, do some serious introspection before you jump. This is not usually an instinctive thing for most, in this case they are lawyers, not marketers, and marketing remains a ‘dark art’ outside their experience and expertise. Marketing has to be at the front of your mind, not just during the start-up phase, but for ever more. While the specific activity that drives client engagement can be turned up or down according to the capacity available to service the business, marketing is a key part of the DNA of every successful business.

Create processes.

Everything in business is a part of a process, no matter how big or small it may be. Therefore the things that are repetitive should be ‘routinised’ as much as possible so they happen with minimum resources, and optimum performance. In other words, they are a productive use of the time and money allocated. Just as providing a professional service requires a process to be followed, so it is with marketing activity. You can automate just about everything these days, which is where a mistake is often made, as automating a rubbish process just leaves you with automated rubbish. There is  no substitute for mapping out what you want to achieve, and the best way to achieve it, piloting and refining, before you automate. Remember also  that automation by definition, removes the ability to be agile in the face of something not considered in the automation phase.

Prioritise ruthlessly.

We only have so much capacity, spreading it thinly just ensures nothing gets done properly. Far better to do less things, well. Therefore, I absolutely subscribe to, and work with clients to prioritise their investment of time money and expertise. You can do this in any number of ways, two of which I like and use. The first is the well known urgent/not important matrix,

 

 

 

 

 

The second is an aggressively culled priority list. Record the top 20 priorities you have in front of you. Prioritise 1 to 20. Draw a line under number 4, or 5, and discard the rest into a ‘carpark’ of some sort, not to be considered at the moment, but too be kept aside, as being in your top 20, there is some importance to be attributed. Ensure that as a part of  the process you have performance measures built in so that you know which parts of your marketing are working, in which case you double down, and which are not in which case you stop, and either save the investment or use it in the doubling down.

Finally.

Find activities you are happy to do, that you can feel proud of, and do  them. You are in business for yourself, being happy is often hard as the pressures can be substantial, so make the effort to find the elements  of the wider role you have taken on, and do those that you enjoy, are good at, and which add value to your business, and outsource the rest, having done sufficient research to ask good questions of potential suppliers.

Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

May 16, 2018 | Collaboration, Governance, Marketing, Strategy

 

The juxtaposition of two trade shows, Manufacturing week last week, and the current CeBIT, have raised some questions in my mind about the road on which we are travelling.

I spent the best part of two days at Manufacturing week, and yesterday at CeBIT, talking, observing, getting caffeinated, and  generally trying to question the preconceptions that seem to be driving the activity I saw. I arrived at a small number of questions that I think  need to be addressed.

How do we overcome the myth of Silicon valley?

Simply put, it seems that the general view is that an ‘App’ or digitisation of something will be the panacea. The VC’s will emerge from their caves and fund the next big thing that will solve all the problems, despite much of the stuff I saw looking a bit like an App in search of a problem to solve, particularly at CeBIT.

There needs to be, in my humble view, more focus and understanding that the improvements in manufacturing will come more from the improvements in material science and engineering than from a  VC funded miracle cure.

The developments that make a real difference are long term ones, basic science that bounces around often for decades before a commercial application is found, a timeframe that requires public funding, as the VC’s will not be interested. A case in point is the development by CSIRO scientists of the wireless LAN technology we all now use every day.

Where do we find the skills to compete?

We are a small country, so graduate numbers in STEM subjects are low by international comparisons, but apparently dropping as a proportion of graduations. Numbers vary, as do definitions, but to be globally competitive we need to increase the number of quality graduates, ensure their funding, and focus their activities on areas where Australia has some sort of competitive advantage. Logically the first two should be an outcome of government policy, sadly lacking, and the latter an outcome of commercial forces over time. Currently we import a substantial percentage of STEM employees and entrepreneurs, a fact demonstrated clearly, albeit qualitatively, at the two trade shows.

How do we build genuine collaboration between Government, Academia and Industry?

This collaboration gets a lot of air time and ‘polly-speak’ but seems lacking. There are a lot of government programs around to assist industry, but most are not well understood, are hard to access, and have demanding guidelines that alienate time poor manufacturing management. To be fair, we all want to see out taxes spent sensibly, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, and make the funding more accessible, and not so risk sensitive to the bureaucratic, risk averse funding bodies. This requires additional expert, non  bureaucratic resources at the early stages of project development and assessment.

The problem with academia holding IP remains a huge stumbling block. I delivered a session at a University recently, for free, on the understanding that I would be given a recording of the session. I put a lot of work into the session, the Professor concerned assured me that the recording would be forthcoming, but it is tangled up in the Universities IP policy, and I have not got it. Next time they ask for help the answer may be different, and this was just a simple exercise of me passing on the wisdom of my experience, not leveraging the IP of some advanced research project in which the University had a hand.

How do we participate meaningfully in the next wave?

Forget today, it is already too late. However, the next wave of development, artificial intelligence, IOT, human/machine interfaces, in short, industry 4.0, the combination of advanced manufacturing and digital technology, is just around the corner.  Australian of the year Professor Michelle Simmons leads a world class quantum physics team,  but I wonder if there is the supporting infrastructure and political longevity of will to leverage the break-throughs that appear to be coming. In addition, there is really only the one team, competing against the world, as well as collaborating with it, and I suspect both are insufficient.

 

As a final observation, and this is a ‘groan’ from a marketing bloke. The quality of thought that has gone into the leveraging of the investment made by the organisations of all sizes with stands at both exhibitions is rubbish.  After Fine Foods last year I penned this post that outlined 18 strategies to leverage the substantial investment required to be present at a trade show. I was astonished, particularly at CEBIT yesterday, the digital tech show,  at the number of times I was allowed to move on after a conversation without the stand staff getting any of my details, even in instances where there was obvious genuine interest, and therefore some potential value in a follow up.

Photo credit: CeBIT via Flikr